ByFrank Jordans, Associated PressApril 27, 2013

Berlin — Reports that the late German actor Horst Tappert, best known for his longtime role as dapper TV sleuth Stefan Derrick, served in a feared Nazi SS unit prompted at least one European broadcaster to announce Saturday that it would drop the show's reruns from its schedule.

Dutch TV station MAX pulled reruns of the show, which was produced from 1974 to 1998, after daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published documents Friday showing the actor had been in the SS during World War II.

"Derrick" was one of the most widely syndicated German TV shows, broadcast in over 100 countries including China, Australia, France and Norway.

Tappert had spoken of his wartime service as a medic in an interview 10 years before his death in 2008. But he didn't mention that his unit was part of the elite SS Armored Infantry Regiment 1, nicknamed the "Skulls" after the emblem they wore.

The SS is known to have committed atrocities during World War II but it was unclear from the newly discovered documents whether Tappert was directly involved.

"The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on Friday that Tappert was a member of an SS anti-aircraft group (SS-Flakabteilung), in Arolsen, Germany, that was under the command of the notorious Waffen-SS.

Sociologist Jörg Becker uncovered a document showing Tappert had been a member of the SS while conducting research at the German agency WASt -- which maintains records of members of the former Wehrmacht, the German military under the Nazis -- for a memoir he is writing about another person. Becker told the newspaper the document shows that Tappert became a member of the Waffen-SS as a low-level grenadier by March 1943 at the latest, at the age of 19."

Peter Grune, a spokesman for German public broadcaster ZDF that co-produced the show's 281 episodes, said nobody at the station had known of Tappert's SS past.

"Stories like these come up now and again," he said. "For us it's not an urgent matter because he's dead."

The hidden history of prominent Germans' involvement in the war has become a subject of public debate again in recent years, after being largely ignored for decades.

In 2006, German Nobel literature laureate Guenter Grass admitted in an autobiography that he had been a member of the SS in the final months of the war. The revelation hurt Grass' image as one of the 'moral consciences' in post-war Germany.

Earlier this year ZDF broadcast a three-part drama about the war, accompanied by a publicity campaign that urged Germans to seek out survivors of the Nazi period and ask them about the role they played at the time.